falena

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

I went to Naples to celebrate my 40th with my BFF Marianna and my friend Francesca from high school. A long weekend away where I could be just myself (not a parent, not a wife, not even a teacher) , eat lots of food and explore a new place in the company of two of my oldest friends was, quite predictably, FANTASTIC. It was also the perfect chance to take my new - used - mirrorless camera for a spin!

What can I say about Naples, it's one of the oldest and most densely-populated cities in Italy, with only two full days we barely scratched the surface of what to see...I had an inkling I was going to like it, but I didn't expect how much. It was just SO familiar. A city squeezed between the hills and the Mediterranean, with a vast historical city centre made up of a maze of alleys...Yeah, it does ring a bell. As I wrote over on Instagram, Naples basically feels like Genova on steroids, lol. It's so busy, bordering on manic, and full of the zest for life we all associate with Southern Italy (I'm sure it's played up for the tourists), the traffic is as mad as you expect... Quite often the sheer quantity of people (locals and tourists) felt overwhelming. Must be because it's been a while since I was in Rome or Venice last, but I honestly didn't remember the crowds there being this exhausting. It might be a sign of me getting old. :P

Anyway, we decided to skip Pompeii and the other archeological sites on purpose because next year Gaia is studying Ancient Rome in school and I want to come back with my family and just explore the Roman bits. So mostly we walked all around downtown Naples kinda aimlessly, stopping only when our feet hurt too much (we walked over 20K steps each day) and/or we wanted to try one of the many culinary delights on offer.

I must report I'm pretty happy with my mirrorless Canon (which is an old model I got second-hand off Francesca's dad), it's light enough and my back didn't bother me at all despite all the walking. This is MASSIVE for me, the main reason I no longer carried my DSLR was that my back hurt too much. I stuck to mostly automatic settings and the all-purpose basic lens it came with, but considering I'm most definitely not a pro I can already tell it meets my basic requirements. Most excitingly, I was able to download my pics via bluetooth/wifi immediately and edit them on my phone in our B&B, which is the sole reason I'm now posting them in a timely fashion. I miss a wide-angle lens, I do have an adapter mount to keep on using my wide-angle lens (and all the other cheap lenses I bought for my DSLR, this is the main reason I stuck to Canon), but I didn't bring all of that with me this time. I mostly used my Pixel 7 when I needed a wider angle.

( Pics under here, a mix of camera and smartphone shots )

Of course you can't go to the South of Italy without seriously overating. But this entry is too long already, so I'll simply link you to the relevant IG post.

If you are saying my youngest daughter, you are, unfortunately, very right. Sigh What can I say, that girl is a magnet for bugs/germs/illnesses of any kind. We should be used to her falling ill whenever we go somewhere and yet every time I keep hoping *this time * we'd be illness-free only to be disappointed.

With the bad out of the way, let's focus on the good. This is our first holiday in the mountains as a family, and the first one for me in...20 years. My parents are keen hikers so our family summer holidays when my brother and I were children were always to the Alps, so we could hike together. I love walking and while I've never been as enthusiastic about hiking as my parents I don't mind it (it's just that my ideal holiday is sightseeing somewhere new, as you all know). Thing is F is definitely not a hiker. I think it's mostly down to the way he was raised, so we never did it as a couple. Now, my church has organised a one-week group holiday in the Alps for forever, mostly aimed at families with kids and elderly people in need of company, when I was a child my family took part several times and I had fond memories of this experience. I just knew the girls would love spending time with all the other kids from our church, and that this way F and I would also get some rest and relaxation (and mostly I hoped F would enjoy the community spirit too - something I never had growing up). This year I managed to talk him into giving this a try (and we also got lucky with the timing of the annual leave he got from work).

This is how we came to be in Gressoney Saint Jean, a village in the Alps, in the area of Italy known as Aosta Valley. This is a bilingual region (French/Italian) since it's near the border with France and Switzerland, but Gressoney is a peculiar place because in the Middle Ages the Walser a German-speaking people, migrated in this area and thus here there's a strong German influence (their German dialect is still spoken today).

I'd forgotten how beautiful and peaceful the mountains are. And when I say mountains I do mean the Alps. It's weird, the area I come from is pretty mountainous (Liguria is in large part occupied by the Appenines, the other Major mountain range in Italy) , and most foreign people who visit it do consider them mountains, but to me anything under 1500m is more like a hill, lol.

Before my youngest fell ill, the girls were always busy with the other kids and needed no supervision, plus someone from the group to keep an eye on them is always out and about - the hotel we're staying in has large, fenced grounds, with volleyball/football/basketball courts, its own small playground, and three indoor playrooms with ping pong tables and foosball and our group makes up 80%of the guests here anyway, it's super safe. This meant I was free to roam the village and the area around our hotel, which is quite nice in itself. See it's at a stone's throw from Castel Savoia, a Summer residence of the former Italian royal family, and it turns out that the hotel building used to be castle's stables. Here it is:

It's gorgeous, I love the pink flowers and the traditional shutters. Don't think it's a posh place, it's a church-owned family hotel, the rooms are spacious but pretty spartan but the food is excellent and the price is excellent value for money.

The village proper is at a 30-minute walk, but you can do that in the woods following the trail known as the Queen's Walk (apparantely a favourite of Queen Margherita di Savoia).

( Lots of mobile pics under here )

Since I don't want for things to go the way they did for my entry about our lovely little trip to Alta Tuscia (=Northern Lazio) last year, where I had technological issues that prevented me from editing my camera pics for about 7 months and then I forgot almost everything about it (my memory is truly horrid, I'm not exaggerating) and I kinda got lazy and lost all enthusiasm about it, I'm going to make a post about the trip with my horrible phone pictures. After all, the purpose of this entry is precisely to preserve those memories for myself, I hope you guys won't think ill of me if the photos are bad.

( MASSIVE post with LOADS of pics )

All in all it was a great holiday, I am happy about how it turned out, every family member got something out of it. And since one thing I hate about social media is how perfect everything looks - F and I fought a couple of times about silly things - mostly when the girls were complaining about something and we were hot and/or tired. The girls get car-sick extremely easily and they do not like playing tourist, so they took a lot of convincing. Sometimes I felt like a bloody drill sergeant just to get the whole family out of the house in time to reach whatever destination we had in mind for the day (timekeeping is not F's forte)...the usual, you know? And yet this is still my kind of holiday and I feel privileged I got to share it with my family, warts and all.

Written with StackEdit.

I just want to write up our three-day visit in Brescia at the beginning of the month, before I forget all the details.

We chose Brescia because it's easily reacheable by train ( 2 hours and 15 minutes using intercity trains, rathern than the cheaper but slower local ones), and we wanted to avoid being on the road at the end of Xmas break, one of the busiest times of the year, especially now that motorways around our town are riddled with construction work. On top of that, it's also a small, compact town, so eaasy to explore on foot even with young kids who are prone to hissy fits when tired. :D

Practical considerations aside, I was quite keen to visit Brescia because it apparently is the largest Roman archeological area in Northern Italy. I just love Roman ruins, and Brescia, or Brixia as the Latins called it, did not disappoint.

Another interesting and peculiar bit of Brescia's history was that it was an important centre during the Longobard rule (apparently I'm meant to call them Lombards in English, I can't, though, it feels weird to me, as in Italian Lombard means something else - but anyway the Longobards were a Germanic people who ruled in Northern Italy after the fall of the western Roman empire, i.e. in the very early middle ages). This can be seen in particular in the monastic complex of Santa Giulia and San Salvatore, a former monastery now turned into a museum. I absolutely loved visiting it as it contained bits of architecture and manufacts from all sorts of different historical periods, starting from the Bronze age, and moving on to Roman ruins, Longobard stuff, Romansque buildings and even Reinassance ones. It's not particularly unusual in Italy, we have loads of sites where different historical layers are just piled up on top of each other, but in the former monastery it was so evident.

The rest of the historical city centre town was a nice mix of medieval and Reinassance buildings, with the exception of a big square that was redone during Fascism, full of Rationalist architecture, which I hate and thus didn't even take a pciture of.

We'd rented a flat, because with young kids I far prefer self-catering to hotels and then having to find places to eat out at. Yeah, this means I had to cook, but I actually made a quiche the day before leaving and then bought some essentials in a supermarket there, to whip up easy dinners at night, so it was no great bother. Staying in is still far more relaxing than having to find a retaurant in the evening, when the girls are tired and more prone to meltdowns, and then spending the whole meal on tenterhooks to try and get everyone fed quickly before we turn into a nuisance for the other customers. I don't mind eating out at lunch time, instead, when we can be in restaurant very early, before peak hour, and the girls are more rested anyway. Indeed both times we ate out at lunchtime the restaurateurs complimented us on how well behaved the girls were, and I can't lie, I was proud, because F and I always make a lot of effort in ensuring they are entertained but quiet (without restorting to giving them our phones, which is a habit I don't want to encourage).

The thing I enjoyed the most, other than the aforementioned attractions, is...the climate. We were blessed with three sunny but cold days. I loved having to wear hats and gloves and feeling the cold biting my face. See, my town is right on the Mediterranean, so it's easy to forget that we don't really get a proper winter. As soon as you cross the Appennines, though, you no longer feel the influence of the sea, and even if those of you live farther north would still find winters in the Po plain pretty balmy, they are noticeably colder than what passes for winter in Genova.

( Pics )

Your favorite holiday -

bearshorty

Ooh, that's a hard one. I enjoy travelling so any holiday that takes me to a new-to-me place just makes me so thrilled, it's hard to choose a favourite.

I barely managed to narrow it down to a top 5 (in chronological order) ...you can find all posts about these clicking on the relevant 'place: xxx' tag in my tags, BTW.

01. Scotland in 2010, with my colleague A.
02. Road trip from Edmonton to Vancouver with

briasoleil in summer 2011.
03. Christmas 2011/New Year's 2012 in Norway with

misscam.
04. Finland with

misscam and

unikorento, summer 2012.
05. Our honeymoon in Portugal, spring 2014.

What's your favourite holiday ever?

Here I am, posting about our long weekend two weeks later. It's not too bad, considering the past two weeks have been the busiest of the school year for me, so far .
Before I spam you all to death with my pics, let me just do a quick summary.

We got to Cervo, the small town which was going to be our base for this jaunt in the Western Riviera, a little before 3 PM on Thursday. We actually meant to get there about one hour before, but we couldn't find our AirBnB flat even with GPS. Anyway, the flat was worth getting lost for, it was really nice, with all mod cons, as they say, dishwasher and microwave included. These two were my main draw in choosing it - I wanted to stay in self-catering accommodation because with two young kids finding kid-friendly places to eat out and actually eating there is often very stressful, so I prefer staying in in even if it means I have to do the cooking.

We quickly unloaded the car and dumped our masses of stuff (ah, the joys of travelling with two young kids, cont.) and headed back out. I knew there was going to be a free guided tour around Cervo starting at 4 PM. We were lucky with the weather, it drizzled a bit but the guided tour went on regardless. The guide was very good and she even opened up a palazzo which is normally closed for the public. G was a real trooper, she walked for two hours (up and down the steep steps of your typical Ligurian villaged perched along the sides of a hill). She mostly entertained herself with my camera, which i then had to fight her for just to take some pics. Lol. Perhaps I should get her a camera of her own. Dunno what the options for young kids are. A slept in the Manduca baby carrier (she didn't want me to pull up the hood which would hold her head up, wtf).

On Friday Anna woke us up at 7 AM as usual. After feeding her, I left F to get both girls ready and I went out to walk around Cervo and get some more decent pics, as the sun was shining! We really lucked out with the weather, it was supposed to pour down for three days. At 9.30 AM we were all ready to go visit another quaint little hill-top village, Diano Castello. The village was perhaps not as pretty as Cervo, but definitely less touristy and it was surrounded by lovely vineyards. It also sported a Romanesque church with a fine example of painted wooden roof trusses, which are a rarity n my corner of the world. I've Again, G was really well-behaved. We visited a lona, one of the typical underground water cisterns that in the past were common around Diano Castello, because the village was built at the top of the hill for defensive purposes, but its position meant it had no access to water, so the villagers had to make do.

We drove back down to Diano Marina, near the seaside, and had lunch in a restaurant there. After lunch we drove to Taggia, another historical little town. When we got there it was raining hard and both girls were asleep. We didn't fancy waking them up to have them traipse around in wet weather. So we hightailed it and went back to Cervo. Now, two of my uni mates, E and V, who became and item during our master's, live in Cervo so I texted them to see if they were available to meet up. I hadn't seen them in 10 years! They were free and they invited us over to their place, so G could also have a playdate with their three-year-old. Their youngest is 2 months younger than A but he and A mostly ignored each other. It was nice, catching up. Also, V's bilingual (German and Italian) so they are raising their kids bilingually, it was cool to see that. Multilingualism FTW!

On Saturday the weather was grey and menacing, so we headed to Imperia,for one of the activities I'd bookmarked for such weather - The Olive Tree Musuem. F really enjoyed it and spent loads in there, the girls and I were a bit quicker but then we spent quite some time in the nearby kids-area, which was really good fun, with lots of kid-friendly activities. After lunch the weather seemed to be holding, so we went for a a walk around the historical centre of Imperia, Porto Maurizio.

On Sunday we woke up to a storm and news of flooding in different corners of the region, so we simply drove back home after breakfast. Since that was our original plan anyway to avoid the traffic jams that happen on the motorway every time there's a long weekend (and people from further north in Italy, think Milan and Turin, come down to the coast), the rain didn't make much of a difference. All in all, it was great little weekend away.

( Pics )

Yesterday I went to Turin to visit my friend C., who's been living there for the past two years while she's studying for her master's at the Polytechnic Univerisity.

I've been meaning to visit her for aaaaaages but never managed to find the time (mostly because I'm lazy and since Turin is only a two-hour train ride's away from Genova it means C comes back every other weekend and I still get to see her regularly).

Thing is, she's graduating in a few weeks, so this was my last chance to have a wander around town with her. And you know what? The weathergods must have decided to reward me for finally getting off my lazy bum, because we got the most glorious, sunny and definitely spring-like day since...September, I suppose. In hindsight, chances are it was actually the weathergods wanting to have a good laugh at my expense (how very Greek of them). Here I was, naively thinking 'Well, I'm going up north, behind the Appennines, well into the dreaded Po plain and nearly at the foot of the Alps - it'll be cold!', so I wrapped up warm with quite a few layers - of course I ended up sweating like a pig, carrying around all those useless layers in a very bulky bundle the whole day. (Why yes, I am whinging Genoese).

By the way,

lilmoka, while I was on the train up I suddenly remembered you actually live in Turin and felt a right fool because maybe we could have met up (if you don't find meeting online people in RL weird or anything, of course - personally I love meeting my i-friends but I know it's not everyone's cup of tea). Only I didn't have your mobile number and of course my ratty old mobile has no internet access so I couldn't even try to contact you on here...Oh well, perhaps next time.

I hadn't been to Turin in quite a long while --I think the last time I was there I was still in secondary school, it was a field trip to the Rivoli Museum and the time before I was in primary school, for the classic trip to the Egyptian Museum Turin has LOTS to offer in the way of museums, for those if you're into that and looking for an Italian destination a bit off the beaten track.

Given my horrid, horrid memory, it's no surprise Sunday felt like my first visit to the city. It was an extremely pleasant re-discovery, anyway.
First of all, despite being the gourth biggest town in Italy, Turin was definitely what we'd call vivibile (Italian, literally 'livable'). It's probably because it's completely flat and built on a grid system, a legacy of its Roman origins, which means that all its streets intersect perpendicularly - a rare thing for historical Italian towns (and extremely baffling for Genoese me - I find all those straight lines a bit disturbing, to be perfectly frank).

See, straight streets everywhere. And on a crips day like yesterday, you could see the Alps peeking in at the end of some streets. Lovely! Of course, C tells me that on the average foggy day you can't see further than you own nose, but hey, we were lucky.

Corollary #1 of the extremely flat, extremely straight and extremely large streets: there's miles of cycling paths and you can cycle everywhere. Guys, I wouldnt' trade living on the Mediterranean for anything, but on a bad day when I'm stuck in a smelly bus in fully-gridlocked Genova, I might be tempted to move somehwere like Turin, where I could just hop on a bike and say goodbye to motorised transport. *wistful sigh*

Corollary #2: Turin people can't park. Look at the cars left in the middle of a road where trams pass both ways!!!! And the waste of space left between each of the awkwardly parked cars, my god, in Genova you'd find your car vandalised by (rightfully fuming) drivers who could have squeezed in there, had you bothered to park decently and tight. Me, the boy and C were all outraged.

The other notable feature of Turin is that four major rivers pass through it: the Po and two of its tributaries, the Po being the only River worthy of its name in the boot. In the sunshine it looked awfully pretty:

If I had to describe Turin in two words I'd say: elegant and poised. You can totally tell it used to be the capital of Italy back when we were still a kingdom. It is, indeed, the closest thing to royal I've seen down here and the adjective regal is actually quite appropriate.

Inside il Parco del Valentino. From right to left: Valentino Castle, two shots of the Medieval Borgo (which was actually built in the late 19th century - fake Medieval stuff, how unnecessary) and the Fountain of the Seasons.

Walking along the Po: a very straight tree-lined avenue, an unmistakable statue of Garibaldi (hero of the Unification of Italy) and the Church of the Great Mother.

The Mole Antonelliana, the symbol of Turin,. It houses the National Museum of Cinema, as the it can be easily guessed.

The heart of royal Turin: Palazzo Reale and the Chruch of San Lorenzo (which was the Savoys' private chapel - the Savoys are our former royal family). As you can see in the thrid pic on the right, the lovely square is marred by a finger-pointing-upwards-shaped monster of a building - guess what? This will come as a surprise to none of the Italians among you, it was built during the Fascism. Seriously, if there was nothing wrong with Fascism already it'd be declared a crime against humanity just because of themonstrosities Mussolini & co had built all over Italy. Ugh.

The Cathedral (rather unimpressive, though it contains the Holy Shroud, for those interested in such things) and the Palatine Towers.

Strolling around the Quadrilatero Romano, the oldest bit of the city centre, of Roman origins. I felt more at ease in the narrower streets (still not what i'd call an alley, by Genoese standards). They also had lovely wrought-iron balconies which prompted one of those endless and amusing word-related discussions Italians are surely familiar with. The Italian word for balcony poggiolo, which we use in Genova, is not used Italy-wide (of course, I found this out in Sicily). It's one of the many 'regionalisms' that always throw us for a loop when Italians from different corners of the boot get together and then have troubles understanding each other as they talk of the most mundane things.

Actually I think I just worked out the perfect sentence to throw at a random Italian and find out where he/she is from. "Could you please go out on the balcony, take the rubbish which is in the shopping bag and take it outside? Be careful, though, bits of chewing gum and cigarette butts might spill out." Hahaha. I dare my Italian i-friends to translate this, I'm sure it'll be fun.

Last but not least, Turin is famous for its chocolate and cafés. Probably because when it's cold and foggy, you just want to hide inside a warm café, sipping coffee and gorging on chocolate. So, C brought us in one of the oldest cafés in town, to taste a typical hot drink called Bicerin (literally - small glass). It was as yummy as it looked.

All in all it was a lovely day. The boy and I decided we'll be paying Turin another visit at some point in the future - we do want to have a good look at the Egyptian Museum, since it's the largest collection of Ancient Egypt aretfacts, after the one in Cairo.